Living on Pynchon Time

So the children are back in school, and I'm not sure whether I'll be back in school or not come January, only that, having looked into this matter more closely, the only thing weighing on my otherwise stellar application to the fine Jesuit nursing school that is as hard to get into as medical school once was is an unfortunate period (this, I should add, is a matter of conjecture, not to mention debate, among many people I know, who, due to having escaped it relatively unscathed, would prefer to remain anonymous) in the late seventies and early eighties where, it would appear, the applicant fiddled around a bit too much in the world of booze, drugs, and women. And stopped going to mass on Sunday. And probably started eating meat on his pizza on Fridays during Lent.

While this was some time ago, and while the current thinking is, officially, among those making decisions on our lives—a group getting younger each year month and day, who, keep in mind, might not have had their seventies time, and may have some bitterness about it when they're looking at your application—that what happened in the seventies stays in the seventies, I'm beginning to think that someone has seen fit to make me pay for my sins. At least nominally.

It's the Catholic way, and while the Jesuits tend to be more philosophical about such matters, more on Augustine's plane than, say, the Pope's—Lord, let me be chaste, just not yet—I have a sneaking suspicion that someone in that deciding outfit is thinking, on my application in particular: "Fuck him. I hardly drink, except when I'm depressed, or when my husband is cheating on me, or when I'm alone, or with somebody ... and I've never done any drugs, especially the fun ones that I keep hearing about from all these fuckers like, I suspect, the applicant, who, by the Grace of God, surely (and that would be just like God, wouldn't it—wouldn't it??!!), quit just in time that he actually looks pretty good for someone fifty fucking one years old, and isn't just muttering to himself in a padded cell in that way people like me, who have only fucked one person in their whole life, and that person, it just so happens, now, is fucking everything he can get his hands on, all figured people like him would end up one day ...

"Well fuck him! He is going to, at the very least, do some penance."

And, to that end, I'm out on my deck this morning, with nothing better to do than read Thomas Pynchon, his latest, Inherent Vice, which I wouldn't recommend to people who didn't have a seventies, or something like it, at some point in their life, though if they're having it now, Pynchon may be a little hard to follow.

I'm still not exactly sure of the plot, which involves a murder in a surfing community in California in the very early seventies. A private eye somewhat like Elliot Gould in Altman's film The Long Goodbye, except our man, Doc Sportello, is a doper, in a milieu of dopers, trying to crack the case.

Thus come some telling lines. Take for instance this one, on page 129: "A private eye [our man Doc] didn't drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops, and truth was, since crossing the doorsill of this place, Doc couldn't help noticing what you'd call an atmosphere."

Indeed. An atmosphere.

Anyway, it's time I got back to my reading, and get a bowl of cereal, a haircut, before the kids get home and the atmosphere, as it were, goes poof!

Enjoy the day.

Back to School

If you don't have children, or your children are grown, off to college or living in your basement, texting endlessly, August 17th may strike you as a bit early for school to be starting. On a Tuesday, no less. Though that's when school starts—started—here in the Boulder Valley School District.

Not that I'm complaining.

The day before it all began we dropped off supplies and met our children's teachers. I hadn't gotten money to the school—didn't check a box, something—in time last spring for our children's supplies to be bought in a tidy lump by the school, and so Donna, my wife, ended up going to Target and picking them up ala carte for about the same money it would have cost us to go out and stuff ourselves on sushi.

She had the bags, six of them, three for each son, sitting on the floor when I got home from karate yesterday. I assumed we'd simply drop off the supplies, dump them into a big tub in the corner, say hello and be gone. I had to get Ian to karate at 3:15 and wouldn't have time to be lingering in the classroom and hallways, chatting up anyone I recognized or hadn't seen all summer, my children tugging on me CAN WE GO NOW? DAD!!!

But then I discovered that all the supplies had to be put in the correct baskets, which were scattered about the room, apparently to make the exercise interesting. Also, I had no idea, really, what sort of supplies were in the bags, only that, collectively, they were heavy, and I was already tired and sweaty from lugging them on foot all the way from our house, looking like some day laborer hauling buckets of cement while the other parents who had checked the box in the spring, or had smart baskets on their bikes, large backpacks one would use for a week-long trip into the wilderness, went by, happy they had thought things through a little better than I had.

I took care of Zachary's first-grade supplies first, feeling, possibly because I'm getting old and petty, a tinge of envy that, for the second year in a row he had got a looker—a hottie, as they say now—for a teacher. I wondered, as I dropped glue sticks and markers into baskets, what this did for a child, and what affect it possibly had on me that my kindergarten teacher, who, while kind and decent, was old and plump as a pumpkin, with a big wart above her eyebrow and a mustache thicker than anything I could grow until I was well into my twenties, that my 1st and 2nd grade teachers were both wrinkled up nuns wearing pre-Vatican II habits; I hadn't got a looker until I was in third grade, and really, that was only by comparison—she wasn't a nun, and was fresh out of college, we were told—and after that nothing, until I was in college, most of which I don't remember. Such were the times.

It was better than ten minutes before I finished and started down the hall to Ian's class, running into a friend along the way, who introduced me to his friends, whose son, looking weary and wearing a hospital mask, I saw now, had leukemia. My friend had texted me the mother's phone number way back in May and I said I would call her but never managed to. Suddenly, looking at the boy, at his parents, I felt like a real asshole, the worse for thinking I had to hurry or Ian—who'd run ahead to his own classroom, whose hair, we might have consoled the boy, had grown back, if somewhat darker, and not as curly—would miss his karate.

"Why's he wearing that mask?" Zachary wondered, standing beside me holding my hand.

"He's got leukemia," all of us adults standing around the boy said not loudly but all at once. The boy, a year younger than Zachary, in kindergarten, I assumed, looked down at his shoes, mortified. I put my arm around Zachary and added, "He's fighting the dragon," a term we had used in our house, and still do, and Zachary nodded, smiling as if to say, "Ah ... that." He was just a baby when Ian was diagnosed; he doesn't remember much, only that people still make a fuss out of it. To him, Ian's just a normal big brother who can be a real prick sometimes.

"We need to get going," said the mom, smiling politely, taking the boy by the hand—Germs, lots of people, lots of germs, don't linger, get him out of here! The father, staying behind, asked if he could get my number, and I said of course and gave it to him and he typed it into his cell phone, all of this taking time, of course. "You'll get through it," I said, thinking, "and afterwards you won't know what to do. Everything will feel like epilogue. You'll go back to failing at things that don't matter, fussing over nonsense."

I was still thinking we could make karate if we really hauled ass. Ian, when we finally met up in his classroom, had the same idea.

Daaad ... Let's GO!!

We never made it to karate. It wasn't even close.

That night we filled out all the paperwork that got sent home in the packet. Permission for this and that, emergency numbers. We don't really have a default emergency person. I tend to select someone new each year, and don't bother anymore to notify them as it just eats up more time. One day, I suppose, they'll just get called. "Hi, this is the school. There's an EMERGENCY, and The Bueltels have selected you this year ... "

"What? I'm in the bathtub, on a chairlift, I'm under anesthesia, having a colonoscopy—"

"We're terribly sorry, but there's an EMERGENCY. I'm afraid one of the Bueltel children is in the office. We found a Swiss Army Knife in his backpack and his parents aren't answering the phone, so ... we called you. You're the emergency person ... "

In the paperwork that was sent home there's a sheet that you and the child have to initial, giving permission for a variety of things that back in the day no one cared about. You didn't worry about someone from the media, for instance, taking your kid's picture; on the contrary, you prayed that it would happen, so you could cut it out and pin it to the wall for everyone to see, lord it over your friends and relatives, whose children, you liked to think, would only get in the paper by way of the police blotter.

I sat down with Ian and we went through the booklet, in particular the part where you're advised on what can get your child suspended from school. There is a long list of things, and much to Ian's dismay we were going over all of them. You can't be initialing things, I explained, unless you read and understand what you're signing. This is how the housing crisis got started, how the Patriot Act got passed, people not reading things, overlooking the fine print—

"Now, first thing you don't want to do is call in any bomb threats. In Singapore, they'd probably cane you for something like that, for just about everything on this list, actually, cane you and send you back to class, so you didn't miss out on anything, rather than expel you, but here in the United States, in the post-911, post-Columbine era—"

"Daaaad—"

"Don't interrupt me, son. This is important."

We discussed what a dangerous weapon was. I went through the list of dangerous weapons, remembering that in sixth grade I'd taken a real German Lugar pistol that my uncle had taken from a dead German during World War II to Show & Tell, this back when you could bring things like that to school so long as you weren't pointing it at anyone and it wasn't loaded, and that there was some educational value associated with, in this case, the war booty my uncle had brought back from Germany, that I got to bring to school.

"You aren't taking drugs, are you? Hitting the bottle, anything like that? I ever find out you're taking gin from that blue bottle I use to mix my martinis and filling it back up with water and you're going to be one sorry—"

"WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY? I DON'T DRINK! I'M EIGHT!"

"That's good, son. What about smoking? Do you smoke?"

"NO!!"

"Happy to hear it. Initial here—"

"AND WHY WOULD I TAKE A GUN TO SCHOOL? OR A BOMB? NOBODY TAKES A GUN OR A BOMB TO SCHOOL. ARE YOU CRAZY?"

"Listen, don't get smart with me. Now, it says here—pay attention!—that you can't tag anything in the bathroom, or spray paint dirty words on the side of the building, especially the new part, or be disruptive like you are around here with your brother whenever your mother or I turn our heads even for a second, because if you do, anywhere around or in school, trust me, you'll be in deep—"

"WHY WOULD I DO THAT, DAD?"

"Do what?"

"ANY OF THIS!"

"I don't know, son. For the life of me, there are things I'll never understand. Just put your initials next to mine, right here ..."

"DAAAD!!"

"And here's another thing: you can't hit on the girls ... or the teachers. It's inappropriate, and if you touch anyone in a swim suit, or is it where the swim suit goes? where you'd wear a swim suit—"

"Can I just go to bed?"

Ahh, the method to my madness. "Sure, son. We can cover the last seventeen things that can get you suspended in the morning."

"Will you read to us?"

"Sure—" The writer, reading his boys to sleep.

"Do we still have some of Treasure Island left?" he asks, my son who rejected Proust as an infant, who likes television more than I wished he did, who associates it with comfort, probably, with safety, all those movies he watched down at Children's Hospital when they loaded him with the drugs ...

"One more chapter," I reply. He and his brother fell asleep last night during the second to last chapter.

"I don't want to read Treasure Island!" Zachary cries. "I hate Treasure Island!"

I finish Treasure Island, but only after reading three other books that Zachary got to pick. Zachary is asleep now, but Ian is still awake, thrashing around in the top bunk, excited about school tomorrow, I have to think. My eyes have given out and I tell him to lie still, but he can't, he can't sleep, he says, and after a few more minutes of hearing him toss we go downstairs and curl under a blanket on the sofa and I turn on Sportscenter, catch the scores. I surf the channels and see there's a Warren Miller movie on and we watch some of that, skiers coming down shoots, flying off cliffs, flipping in the air, landing and tumbling in the snow, crashing into rocks. He likes watching the skiers but wants to know if South Park is on. That's what we'd watched the last time he couldn't sleep. "You know the guys who created this show, they're from Columbine High School, down in Littleton, just on the other side of Denver," I say, but he doesn't know what the fuck I'm talking about, doesn't care, just loves those crazy little round-headed kids and their smart mouths, he and I sitting here under the blanket on the night before school after everyone else is asleep, laughing. Before long he turns and faces the cushion and I hear a sigh. I mute the sound and sit there with him in the quiet, stroking his hair that is straighter and darker and a little more coarse than it once was. In a few years he'll be too big to carry up to bed, but not yet. Not yet.

Doing Words

As some of you may know, I finished the novel that I began more or less thirteen years ago earlier this year, around Valentine's Day, and subsequently sent it to my agent, who, back in the summer of 2006, after reading the excerpt that Narrative Magazine had recently published (see link to the left, under bio), cold-called me to see if I had representation, and if I had more for her to read. It was a very heady day. I had just given a reading a month earlier that had gone over well, surprising some of my friends who had suspected that, rather than writing all these years, I was sitting in my living room most every day sucking back martinis with my bacon and eggs while staring, increasingly pixillated, at Rockies highlights on ESPN, if not something quite a lot more nefarious and fun, that might have involved roller blades, party hats, chocolate sundaes with cherries on top—all of which, I should add, are possibilities for Tuesday morning, when the children go back to school—and now I was getting a call from an agent, a Harvard graduate, smart, young, hungry and beautiful, I would later find out, from an established house in New York.

I had 180 pages out with my editor, I told her, anxiously, so no, I didn't have anything more for her to read just yet—but would, soon, I promised. In the meantime, perhaps we could have lunch? It so happened I was coming to New York at the end of the month, on my way to Nova Scotia. Sure, she said ... and a few weeks later we met at a place in Midtown, on Broadway, an Italian place where they were showing "La Dolce Vita" on the wall, Anita Eckburg soaking wet in the Trevi ... How long have you been working on the book? she, my prospective agent, asked, after confiding that the excerpt she read reminded her vaguely of ... Mrs. Dalloway (there is nothing she could have said that could have flattered me more, and I mean nothing). I told her around ten years, give or take, that instead of writing, say, four books and throwing them in a drawer, I had just kept at this one, and somehow it had kept going with me. This, I was hoping, put me in a class with Shirley Hazzard, Harold Brodkey, Marilynne Robinson, and one of my teachers, the great measured pace novelist Carol Edgarian. Anyway, the agent didn't seem to care if it had taken me 20 years, and getting my attention once more away from Anita Eckburg's drenched visage, said she was eager to read more. Later, that fall, I would be in New York City again, this time for a friend's birthday, and would hand her 66 pages of recently edited work after having drinks at the Algonquin. Might as well be stylish about the hand off, yes? She would like these pages, too, if not, it seemed, quite as much as she'd liked that excerpt. Still, it didn't occur to me that, in spite of a signed contract (which she'd been careful to explain didn't mean much), she would, roughly a year later, when I sent her what I thought was the final draft of the book, tell me that she didn't think she could sell it. I asked her why, and she really couldn't tell me. She'd lost me somewhere in the middle, she said, and, sensing myself that the middle was the weakest part of the book, I tore it open over the next couple of years and redrafted it (while my wife was in nursing school, and later, when I was taking classes to do the same, with two young boys orbiting, after selling a farm, while the financial world was falling apart), and then sent it to her again, last February, though her opinion, regrettably, didn't change. I was more braced for the disappointment this time, however. Rather than getting kicked in the gut, it was more like I'd finally summited a mountain after a long climb only to run into a couple of twelve year olds in hoodies, brandishing screwdrivers, telling me they wanted money, right now, and that if I was thirsty, due to blood loss from my screwdriver wounds, there was a half a can of Red Bull leaned over there on a rock, next to where they'd pissed. Anyway, they were leaving now ...

Not to say my agent, my former agent, perhaps my agent again should I get her something that she can sell, wasn't kind. I'm sure it isn't easy to give a writer bad news. Most of us are assholes on a good day, and this was not a good day. Yet she wasn't, and isn't, the sort of person who lives up to the stereotypes, who puts a bad taste in your mouth, and that made it all the more dispiriting. It would have been nice to at least be able to hate her.

I haven't done a thing with the manuscript since ... but, hey, that is about to change.

As some of you also know, I applied to the Regis Nursing Program earlier this summer. Out of 380 applicants, I was one of 180 who was selected to be interviewed. Of those, 96 would be taken. I discovered late Wednesday, on the Regis website, that I was not one of those, but part of the next group of 40 or so "alternates." Which is to say that I still don't know if I'll be going to nursing school in January. Certainly I can't plan on it. Between five and twenty-five accepted students, for one reason or another, will decline their acceptance between now and January 9th, and Regis will replace them from my unranked group of forty alternates, a group that, for one reason or another, will also grow smaller over time.

I was reminded when I called the point person at Regis minutes after finding out, near crazy with despair but trying hard not to show it, that the process was intensely competitive. Still, I had aced all my recent science classes, taken, many of them, while I was finishing the novel. I had considerable experience in health care, a child who had survived cancer—what the fuck?

Yet when the last class of students has an overall GPA of 3.5 (a number formerly associated with admittance into medical school, not nursing school), an overall GPA in the high twos, early undergrad transcripts all but stamped with Misspent Youth perhaps tend to stand out. As I suspect they did.

Still, I'm an alternate. I should probably be pleased.

Fuck that.

For some time now I've wondered what I'd do if I didn't get accepted. In these abstract moments suicide is generally, for vainglorious reasons, no doubt, at the top of my list. It was the same way when I was working on the book, thinking, What if this doesn't work? What then? Well, I could always kill myself ...

Similarly, if I didn't get into nursing school at age 51 ...

Easy come, easy go.

But, as that movie "The Anniversary Party" pointed out, children rather rob us of this option. Never mind that I'm too much of a coward to do it even if I had Alzheimer's.

And Donna, who'd get quite an insurance payout if I staged it well (ran my car off a bridge, say, as opposed to taking both barrels to the head, which would be derivative, but never mind), claims she'd rather have me than the money, at least this was still true last week—

So ... I may have to get back to where, according to Donna and few others, I belong in the first place: Doing words.

And possibly editing other people's words. Which pays better—nearly anything does. And I'm good at it. And would likely enjoy it more than wiping other people's asses, getting sputum shot at me ...

Yet, you watch, those Regis people, now that I've had this Come-To-Jesus Moment, will probably let me in, just to be perverse, to fuck with my head.

I guess we'll see.

I'll keep you posted.

And btw—I'm back.